I’m always wanting to fight Jon, so I’m hoping Jon can pull through it, but if anybody can give him trouble, I would think it would be Machida, and for a couple of reasons. One reason is because Machida’s used to that kinda craftiness and movement because he trains with Anderson Silva, so he’s used to seeing that. That’s where Jon Jones got a lot of his style from is Anderson Silva. So Lyoto is used to training with the originator. Now one thing that Jon Jones brings to the table that Anderson doesn’t is the ability to take the fight to the ground. He brings that ground and pound and Jon is very good at that, so there are a couple of areas where Lyoto will have to watch out for Jon, but for the most part, if he can use his footwork and watch out for some of the tricks and not stay on the outside and watch like everyone else does…but I think he could do pretty good in this fight.

Anderson Silva would definitely be the ideal training partner for Machida in this fight, but as Machida told Sherdog recently, he can’t count on Silva helping since Silva has so many obligations these days.

“We told Ed and Joinha that we would want to bring in Anderson to help,” Machida said, “but I can’t count on that because he has so many obligations, and I respect that. He’s the biggest name in MMA. I would love to have him beside me for this camp and he will be welcomed if he joins us, but I don’t want to count on him and not have it happen.”

Well, there’s always Steven Seagal! I’m sure he’ll want to help Machida after Jones shot him down at UFC 136.

Back to Rashad, it’s unclear what’s next for him. He could simply wait to fight the Jones-Machida winner or take another fight in the meantime. According to Dana White, Evans is leaning towards the latter.

“I told him that, ‘you’re the unluckiest guy I ever met.’ Depending on the timing and how all this shit works out he will fight again. He wants to. He was like ‘I’m not gonna sit around and wait again.’ So he probably will (fight). We’ll see how this whole thing goes down, we’ll see what happens. Plus Jon Jones has fought four times in 10 months. It’s crazy.”

That’s probably a wise choice considering how waiting backfired on him before. As much as he’d like to get his hand on Jones, I’m sure he’d like to get his hands on his next paycheck just as much, and the UFC typically doesn’t hand those out to fighters sitting on the sidelines. All he can do is fight and hope the stars eventually align.

Update: Lyoto Machida confirmed today that Anderson Silva called him and offered his assistance, so it looks like Silva will be playing Jon Jones in Machida’s camp after all. That will definitely be a huge help.